{"id":3996,"date":"2018-03-26T17:42:54","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T17:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=3996"},"modified":"2018-03-26T17:42:54","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T17:42:54","slug":"homeschooling-in-the-united-states-a-critique-of-advocacy-research-and-individualism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=3996","title":{"rendered":"HOMESCHOOLING IN THE UNITED STATES: A Critique of Advocacy Research and Individualism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record:\u00a0<\/strong>T. Jameson Brewer and Christopher Lubienski, “Homeschooling in the United States: Examining the Rationales for Individualizing Education” in\u00a0Pro-Posi\u00e7\u00f5es<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>28, no. 2 (May\/August 2017): 21-38.\u00a0 [Available Here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Summary:<\/strong>\u00a0Brewer <\/a>teaches in the education department at the University of North Georgia and is perhaps best known for his book<\/a>\"\"\u00a0offering a withering critique of Teach For America<\/a> by aggregating first person narratives from disgruntled alumni of the program.\u00a0 Lubienski<\/a>, who teaches educational policy at Indiana University,\u00a0is a longtime critic of privatization reform efforts and of unregulated homeschooling.\u00a0 The two authors have worked together on several projects<\/a> for the National Education Policy Center, and they collaborated in 2013 on an article<\/a> that, like the present one, criticizes the empirical claims of advocacy-based homeschooling researchers.<\/p>\n

This article begins with a general introduction to homeschooling in the United States, noting its historical development and especially its legal grounding in the Supreme Court’s\u00a0\u00a0Meyer\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Pierce<\/em> decisions in the mid 1920s that found that the State did not have the right to require all children to attend public schools only.<\/p>\n

It then reiterates arguments Brewer and Lubienski made in their 2013 article<\/a> against\u00a0 claims that homeschoolers outperform public schoolers on standardized tests.\u00a0 Basically, advocacy researchers have not controlled for parent background variables.\u00a0 Of course wealthy, white children from stable two-parent homes whose parents are college-educated are going to outperform the national average.\u00a0 They would do that regardless of where they went to school.<\/p>\n

Next, Brewer and Lubienski reiterate their refutation of the advocates’ claims that homeschooling save taxpayers money and is cheaper than institutional schooling.\u00a0 As in their 2013 article<\/a>, they note, first of all, that homeschoolers do in fact use a lot of public money (through the local public library, charter schooling, education savings accounts, etc<\/em>.).\u00a0 Secondly, public schools do not usually see the savings claimed, for removal of one or two children from a classroom doesn’t change the fundamental costs of running a school.\u00a0 Finally, homeschooling costs a lot more than advocates claim it does, because advocates have not calculated the cost of the stay-at-home parent’s labor.\u00a0 If a mother foregoes a career so she can stay at home to educate her children, the cost of homeschooling balloons into the tens of thousands per year.<\/p>\n

The paper concludes with a final section critiquing the individualistic assumptions underlying homeschooling ideology.\u00a0 Homeschooling, like other school choice initiatives, elevates “the individual over the collective good.” (p. 33)\u00a0 Be they religious conservatives, child-centered liberals, or pragmatists, parents who choose homeschooling turn their backs on the longstanding American “belief in education for the public and common good.” (p.34)<\/p>\n

Appraisal:<\/strong>\u00a0 The first thing to note about this article is that, especially compared to the 2013 piece from which it cribs much of its content, it is not very well written.\u00a0 My summary makes it sound more coherent than it is.\u00a0 The text itself contains a number of asides and tangents that suggest a hasty, undisciplined construction.<\/p>\n

In terms of content, readers of this blog will know that I agree completely with Brewer and Lubienski’s arguments about the empirical research for academic achievement and for fiscal effect.\u00a0 I do not, however, think that they are entirely correct in their association of homeschooling with neoliberal individualism.<\/p>\n

It is true that many if not most homeschooling families do not\u00a0think much about the\u00a0common good.\u00a0 But in this they are only reflecting the dominant trend in American culture since the mid-1960s.\u00a0 It’s not just the homeschoolers who are Bowling Alone<\/a>\"\".\u00a0 In fact, I think homeschooling could easily be read as an effort to fight against<\/em> the very individualism Brewer and Lubienski critique.\u00a0 Homeschoolers are famous for their social networking with other homeschoolers and their remarkably effective political mobilization when their interests are at stake.<\/p>\n

There are other ways to think of the common good than to envision, as Brewer and Lubienski seem to do, a homogeneous mass all attending the same institution and receiving the same socialization.\u00a0 It is one of the truisms of evolutionary biology that diversity of the gene pool is a boon to long-range survival of the group.\u00a0 One could argue that homeschooling likewise serves the common good by keeping alive dissenting, alternative\u00a0communities<\/em> of people, allowing them to flourish in all their diversity and to preserve minority cultural memes for the future.<\/p>\n

Homeschooling provides space for eccentrics and nonconformists to flourish.\u00a0 True enough, as Brewer and Lubienski point out, some of those eccentrics end up abusing children in horrific ways<\/a>.\u00a0 Common-sense regulations should be put in place to help identify such families and protect their children.\u00a0 But much more often homeschooling provides a space for children to grow up different<\/em>.\u00a0 In an age that wants so badly to promote diversity, this attribute of homeschooling should be celebrated.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither<\/p>\n

Messiah College<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record:\u00a0T. Jameson Brewer and Christopher Lubienski, “Homeschooling in the United States: Examining the Rationales for Individualizing Education” in\u00a0Pro-Posi\u00e7\u00f5es\u00a028, no. 2 (May\/August 2017): 21-38.\u00a0 [Available Here] Summary:\u00a0Brewer teaches in the education department at the University of North Georgia and is perhaps … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19,891],"tags":[782,144,122,1104,121,1739,1343,1747,1746],"class_list":["post-3996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parental-motivation","category-research-methodology","tag-christopher-lubienski","tag-indiana-university","tag-meyer-v-nebraska","tag-national-education-policy-center","tag-pierce-v-society-of-sisters","tag-proposicoes","tag-t-jameson-brewer","tag-teach-for-america","tag-university-of-north-georgia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3996"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4001,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3996\/revisions\/4001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}